Use, Misuse, Disuse, Abuse
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Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society http://hfs.sagepub.com/ Humans and Automation: Use, Misuse, Disuse, Abuse Raja Parasuraman and Victor Riley Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 1997 39: 230 DOI: 10.1518/001872097778543886 The online version of this article can be found at: http://hfs.sagepub.com/content/39/2/230 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Additional services and information for Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society can be found at: Email Alerts: http://hfs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://hfs.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://hfs.sagepub.com/content/39/2/230.refs.html >> Version of Record - Jun 1, 1997 What is This? Downloaded from hfs.sagepub.com at HFES-Human Factors and Ergonomics Society on August 15, 2014 HUMAN FACTORS, 1997,39(2),230-253 Humans and Automation: Use, Misuse, Disuse, Abuse RAJA PARASURAMAN,1Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., and VICTOR RILEY, Honeywell Technology Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota This paper addresses theoretical, empirical, and analytical studies pertaining to human use, misuse, disuse, and abuse of automation technology. Use refers to the voluntary activation or disengagement of automation by human operators. Trust, mental workload, and risk can influence automation use, but interactions between factors and large individual differences make prediction of automation use difficult. Misuse refers to overreliance on automation, which can result in failures of moni- toring or decision biases. Factors affecting the monitoring of automation include workload, automation reliability and consistency, and the saliency of automation state indicators. Disuse, or the neglect or underutilization of automation, is com- monly caused by alarms that activate falsely. This often occurs because the base rate of the condition to be detected is not considered in setting the trade-off between false alarms and omissions. Automation abuse, or the automation of functions by design- ers and implementation by managers without due regard for the consequences for human performance, tends to define the operator's roles as by-products of the au- tomation. Automation abuse can also promote misuse and disuse of automation by human operators. Understanding the factors associated with each of these aspects of human use of automation can lead to improved system design, effective training methods, and judicious policies and procedures involving automation use. INTRODUCTION Technical issues-how automation functions are implemented and the characteristics of the The revolution ushered in by the digital com- associated sensors, controls, and software- puter in the latter half of this century has funda- dominate most writing on automation technol- mentally changed many characteristics of work, ogy. This is not surprising, given the sophistica- leisure, travel, and other human activities. Even tion and ingenuity of design of many such more radical changes are anticipated in the next systems (e.g., automatic landing of an aircraft). century as computers increase in power, speed, The economic benefits that automation can pro- and "intelligence." These factors sustain much of vide, or is perceived to offer, also tend to focus the drive toward automation in the workplace public attention on the technical capabilities of and elsewhere, as more capable computer hard- automation, which have been amply documented ware and software become available at low cost. in such diverse domains as aviation (Spitzer, 1987), automobiles (IVHS America, 1992), manu- I Requests for reprints should be sent to Raja Parasuraman, facturing (Bessant, Levy, Ley, Smith, & Tran- Cognitive Science Laboratory, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064. field, 1992), medicine (Thompson, 1994), robotics © 1997, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. All rights reserved. Downloaded from hfs.sagepub.com at HFES-Human Factors and Ergonomics Society on August 15, 2014 HUMAN USE OF AUTOMATION June 1997-231 (Sheridan, 1992),and shipping (Grabowski & Wal- mation on team (Bowers, Oser, Salas, & Cannon- lace, 1993). Bowers, 1996) or job performance (Smith & Humans work with and are considered essen- Carayon, 1995) or on organizational behavior tial to all of these systems. However, in com- (Gerwin & Leung, 1986; Sun & Riis, 1994). We parison with technical capabilities, human capa- also do not examine the wider sociological, so- bilities-human performance and cognition in ciopsychological, or sociopolitical aspects of au- automated systems-are much less frequently tomation and human behavior (Sheridan, 1980; written about or discussed in public forums. This Zuboff, 1988), though such issues are becoming stems not from a relative lack of knowledge increasingly important to consider in automation (Bainbridge, 1983; Billings, 1991; Chambers & design (Hancock, 1996; Nickerson, 1995). Nagel, 1985; Hopkin, 1995; Mouloua & Parasura- What Is Automation? man, 1994; Parasuraman & Mouloua, 1996; Ras- mussen, 1986; Riley, 1995; Sheridan, 1992; Wick- We define automation as the execution by a ens, 1994; Wiener & Curry, 1980; Woods, 1996) machine agent (usually a computer) of a function but, rather, from a much greater collective em- that was previously carried out by a human. phasis on the technological than on the human What is considered automation will therefore aspects of automation. change with time. When the reallocation of a In this paper we examine human performance function from human to machine is complete aspects of the technological revolution known as and permanent, then the function will tend to be automation. We analyze the factors influencing seen simply as a machine operation, not as auto- human use of automation in domains such as mation. Examples of this include starter motors aviation, manufacturing, ground transportation, for cars and automatic elevators. By the same and medicine, though our treatment does not fo- token, such devices as automatic teller machines, cus on anyone of these systems. Consideration of cruise controls in cars, and the flight manage- these factors is important not only to systems ment system (FMS) in aircraft qualify as automa- currently under development, such as automa- tion because they perform functions that are also tion tools for air traffic management (Erzberger, performed manually by humans. Today's auto- 1992), but also to far-reaching system concepts mation could well be tomorrow's machine. that may be implemented in the future, such as Automation of physical functions has freed hu- "free flight" (Planzer & Hoffman, 1995; Radio mans from many time-consuming and labor- and Technical Committee on Aeronautics, 1995). intensive activities; however, full automation of A prevalent assumption about automation is cognitive functions such as decision making, that it resides in tyrannical machines that replace planning, and creative thinking remains rare. humans, a view made popular by Chaplin in his Could machine displacement of human thinking movie Modern Times. However, it has become become more commonplace in the future? In evident that automation does not supplant hu- principle, this might be possible. For example, man activity; rather, it changes the nature of the devices such as optical disks are increasingly re- work that humans do, often in ways unintended placing books as repositories of large amounts of and unanticipated by the designers of automa- information. Evolutionary neurobiologists have tion. In modem times, humans are consumers of speculated that extemal means of storing infor- automation. We discuss the human usage pat- mation and knowledge (as opposed to intemal tems of automation in this paper. storage in the human brain) not only have played First, however, some restrictions of scope an important role in the evolution of human con- should be noted. We focus on the influence of sciousness but will also do so in its future devel- automation on individual task performance. We opment (Donald, 1991). Hence permanent alloca- do not consider in any detail the impact of auto- tion of higher cognitive functions to machines Downloaded from hfs.sagepub.com at HFES-Human Factors and Ergonomics Society on August 15, 2014 232-June 1997 HUMAN FACTORS need not be conceptually problematic. Moreover, mance in the resulting system. As we discuss such a transfer will probably not replace but, later, however, this is not always the case. In the rather, will modify human thinking. In practice, ultimate extension of this practice, automation however, despite more than three decades of re- would completely replace operators in systems. search on artificial intelligence, neural networks, Automation has occasionally had this effect (e.g., and the development, in Schank's (1984) terms, in some sectors of the manufacturing industry), of the "cognitive computer," enduring transfer but more generally automation has not com- of thinking skills to machines has proven very pletely displaced human workers. Although in lay difficult. terms it is easiest to think of an automated sys- Automation can be usefully characterized by a tem as not including a human, most such sys- continuum of levels rather than as an all-or-none tems, including "unmanned" systems such as concept (McDaniel, 1988; Riley, 1989; Sheridan, spacecraft,